Page:Life of Robert Burns, the Ayrshire Bard.pdf/23

Rh The heroic arc also of a high order, and though the satirical are inferior to the poems of the same description, they are not unworthy of his varied talents. His bacchanalian songs are very few in number, and this is matter of surprise. He did not write above half-a-dozen in all, and those reflect the highest credit on the writer, though they possess the fault which, however, is inherent in the subject itself, of decorating the vice of inebriety in false colours. From the short remarks our limited space allows us to make, it will be seen, that although the Ayrshire ploughman did not compose any piece which can be compared with Milton's Paradise Lost, or the Æneid of Virgil, he possessed genius of the very highest order, and had he been placed in more favorable circumstances, there is every reason to believe he would have produced a poem which might rank with any that has yet appeared. We are aware that some would-be-critics, have charged Burns with plagiarism, because they have, after a great deal of labour, discovered some thought which had been expressed by some former writer. We think, however, that originality consists not only in the expression of ideas which were never before embodied in language, but in pouring them out with an eloquence that "speaks from the heart to the heart." Of the prose composition of Burns, con-